Michael C. Frank

Imaginative Geography as a Travelling Concept: Foucault, Said and the spatial turn

In his 1982 essay on ‘Traveling Theory’, Edward Said argues that the transfer of ideas in the humanities and the social sciences is influenced by both ‘conditions of acceptance’ and ‘resistances’. The journey of theories, he explains, is never unimpeded. Following this observation, the present study wishes to explore further the factors determining the itinerary of theories. It puts forward the thesis that the interdisciplinary reception of theory is a selective – and historically variable – process, depending on the receiving disciplines dominant paradigm, which directs the researchers’ attention to those aspects of the received theory that can best be adapted to their present purpose. In the process, individual concepts are isolated from their original context and reintegrated into a new theoretical and disciplinary environment. My example of this is the divergent use of Michel Foucault and Edward Said in the contexts of the respective linguistic and spatial turns, firstly as pioneers of discourse analysis and secondly as precursors of spatial thinking. As the current interest in Foucault and Said as explorers of ‘imaginative geographies’ shows, each turn emphasizes other concepts of a travelling theory, leading to highly productive – though always partial – (mis-)readings.

Conjuring up the next attack: the future-orientedness of terror and the counterterrorist imagination

Although terrorism is widely understood to be the politically motivated creation of fear by means of violence in a target group, the nature of that fear is seldom explained or even considered. The present article attempts to close that gap by proposing a definition of terror as the apprehension of (more) violence to come. Because every terrorist act is perceived to be part of a potential series, terror is oriented towards the future and involves the imaginary anticipation of prospective events. On the basis of this definition, I will examine the problematical role of counterterrorist discourse. As the statements of public officials and security experts in the run-up to, and during, the “War on Terror” demonstrate, the peculiar dynamic of terror is, seemingly paradoxically, reinforced by counterterrorist rhetoric. With its insistence on the escalatory nature of terrorist violence and its repeated prediction of even worse attacks, counterterrorism contributes to the evocation of terror in the sense proposed here.

Reisen durch Raum und Zeit : Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness und die Vernetzung der Welt um 1900

It is a truism among historians, sociologists, and anthropologists that, in the West, the advent of modern technologies of travel and communication led to an “overcoming of distance” and even a gradual “annihilation of space and time”. Whereas turn-of-the-century geographers like George R. Parkin and H. J. Mackinder suggest that this is also true for much of the non-Western world, Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness dramatizes the Congo region as an “other space” that, although no longer white on the map, resists European attempts at empire-building and economic-technological expansion. Conrads work shows that the perception of distance depends not only on the actual advances in travel and communication technologies, but also – and perhaps more importantly – on the construction of “imaginative geographies”. Around 1900, Central Africa was both spatially and temporarily distanced; it represented a different state of cultural development – a chronotope not (yet) part of the global network.